


mitski and the iconoclast

by lalalyds2



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Sibling Incest, Songfic, Sorta - free form, Spellcest, a mitski aftermath, some violence (not too gory tho), sort of s2 spoilers but not really, this is about as happy as my last mitski fic ;p
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-09
Updated: 2019-07-09
Packaged: 2020-06-25 04:28:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19738327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalalyds2/pseuds/lalalyds2
Summary: revenge can't undo damageself destruction damages differentlyzelda keeps fighting the war because no one can tell her it ended-OR-i've been listening to mitski again and frenchtwistresistance asked for angst





	mitski and the iconoclast

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FrenchTwistResistance](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrenchTwistResistance/gifts).



~*~ Bag of Bones ~*~

A rivulet of blood is trickling down her forearm.

A rivulet is running down her cheek.

A trembling hand pushes it off, but the smudge sticks.

Stains.

It is so quiet here.

Or perhaps she is in shock.

The axe hangs heavy by her side, dripping on the forest floor.

She does not look at the mess her husband made.

She looks at her hands.

The color has worn off. Chipped off.

She drops the axe.

It is so quiet here now.

The sound has been all used up.

When she sets everything ablaze, there is no crackling of heat, no snap of the violence.

There is only the moon bearing silent witness, coating gore and pyre with liquid silver.

This is no funeral.

It is execution.

Once everything is done and he is gone and she is undone, Zelda leaves the woods.

Heels wobble on frightened grass, clack on tar road, click on sidewalk.

She hears none of it.

She is searching for one thing.

It comes in fluorescent shop lights, the flickering neon illuminating red on sticky pores.

Zelda enters Dr. Cerberus’ shop.

Drips on the carpet.

“Hello, welcome to—“ Hilda’s cheery voice halts.

She takes in the blood on body, the hands open and hanging limp.

The silence in Zelda’s face.

She doesn’t say another word.

Doesn’t move.

“I’ve done it.”

Zelda’s voice a croak.

A broken point.

“He’s gone.” 

And then Hilda has her hands, the magic goes clench, and they are home in Zelda’s bedroom.

It is a mess.

Hilda starts a bath.

Zelda stares hollowly at the bed.

She stares at her nails.

The black is chipping off.

There’s red under it.

She does not know when she got in the tub, but she is there, and Hilda is tipping her head back to wash her hair.

The water is murk anger.

“Open the window.”

The sponge on her back pauses.

“You’ll catch your death.”

Silence permits no argument.

She shivers on wind.

Approves how the skin goose pimples.

Water slides off limbs as she steps out.

The towel is too tender.

Her bedroom window is closed.

It is too quiet here.

She rushes the glass, pushes it high and there is a delicious howl.

The wind rushes.

She shoves her stuff up off the bed. It hits the ground in painful, discordant clatter.

She hears it, finally.

She is alive.

Faustus is not.

Hilda is alive.

Watching with wide eyes.

Zelda turns. Drops the towel.

Wide eyes ever wider.

She feels a wander on her chest, in the dips of her rib cage, in the pips of her bellybutton.

Her hand is pale and reaching.

“Come here, sister.”

Hilda’s head shakes.

“Now.”

She hears her steps on the carpet.

Feels hot breath on her clavicle.

The numb is going.

The going will rip her apart.

“Will you kiss me?”

They are both surprised she’s asking.

Hilda licks her lips.

Says nothing.

There is a beast in her.

She kisses Hilda anyway.

Neither are surprised.

“Please,” is said against quivering lips. “Spare me tonight.”

Hilda’s hand is so gentle on her neck.

“Will you let me let go?”

It only takes a nod.

Zelda savages her sister’s mouth.

She knows it only hurts.

Hilda moans anyway.

Polyester rips, red tipped fingers on softly bruising skin.

Hilda hits the bed none too gently.

There are rolling hips and grinding rhythms and bodies in undulation.

Zelda astride her sister, taken three fingers deep.

She rocks hard and hate-filled.

Water drips from eye corners.

She grits teeth and says she can take a little bit more.

Hilda falters.

She bears down and asks a mercy.

And then there is more, and she is so far gone.

She tears apart, comes down on shaking fingers and worried eyes.

She lets Hilda hold her till the sweat settles.

When the skin is bumpy and cold, wind sliding on her back, she turns to the other side.

Watches the window.

“Get out.”

She only hears Hilda leave.

Her eyes don’t leave the open frame.

When the sun comes up, she watches alone.

She is all used up.

It is far too quiet here.

~*~ I Bet On Losing Dogs ~*~

Time passes.

Zelda clings in odd staccato.

When Hilda is in the kitchen, humming and content, there is a seethe.

Hilda sears red peppers.

Zelda sears Hilda.

Biting words and harsh criticisms.

There is a specific worthlessness to cooking family dinner when no family eats it.

Ambrose is looking for a dead man.

Sabrina is looking for a lost boy.

Zelda is looking for something in Hilda that never appears.

Hilda worries with eyes closed in the hallway.

Stays home and doesn’t keep shop.

When Cee calls, she answers in a whisper.

Zelda still finds her.

Kisses her throat and calls her baby and has her right against the floral wallpaper.

Hilda calls Cee back on shaky knees.

Zelda starts gambling.

She stays in the parlor and never goes to bed.

Finds a channel on the television—a non-approved dog race after 11pm.

She calls the flashing number and bets on the saddest, slowest ones.

As they come in last, she inches closer to the screen, watches their panting faces with sheer avidity.

They only go down last.

Losers, every time.

She holds her throat and whispers a cheer.

There is desperation and feeling.

Vinegar Tom watches her from his basket and doesn’t blink once.

In the morning, when she feels finally fine, she goes and finds Hilda.

Straddles thighs and asks nicely and dies a little death and watches Hilda watch it all.

When the worry fades, the fighting starts up again.

Hilda doesn’t always cry. 

She takes Zelda’s aspersions and tucks them away somewhere locked and bolted and says it’s okay.

Zelda bites harder, yells harsher.

Hilda soothes softer, goes tender.

Neither knows the game they are playing.

Neither knows the outcome.

Opposite sisters on opposing sides.

Zelda fights her fight and clings to claim.

She is desperate to lose; she is terrified to.

She only wants a patron saint.

She only wants someone else to bleed.

~*~ A Pearl ~*~

Hilda is growing tired of her.

She can feel it in the way they move.

Or the way they move no longer.

Hilda is still loving so hard in that gentle way of hers.

Zelda cannot take any more whispered promises.

Zelda cannot take any more tender hands tucking away roseate curls.

Zelda cannot take any more touch.

It’s not that she doesn’t want her.

Every time her hands are Hilda-empty, she clenches hands till the fingers dig half-moon trenches in her palms.

The blood causes pearl panic.

It grows bigger every night.

She calls the TV set number and loses money and glows in the lost battle and is fine the next morning.

She rolls the cricks from her neck and doesn’t sleep at all.

The telltale signs are wiped away by makeup and fading magic.

Hilda is growing tired of her.

The sweetness is not so sweet.

Hilda’s mellow is not so mellow.

They are growing more and more each day.

More silent, more hostile, more comfortable in distance.

It is a relief that rips deep.

There is violence growing in her gut.

She revels in the fester.

She is manically kind. She is rapturously angry.

It glows capricious in nighttime.

It’s gone in the morning.

She bites and snarks and subverts till Hilda questions what reality each new day will bring.

Anger, like love, is easy to have when the sun goes down.

It evaporates under substantial lighting.

Perhaps it was never there.

Perhaps it never left.

Emotion hallucinates.

She says so.

Hilda says trauma.

She says ha.

The voice breaks and the battle is lost.

Hilda wonders at victory and mentions his name.

It doesn’t matter the weapon Zelda uses.

It matters that Hilda wakes up spitting dirt.

“You promised.”

She is so betrayed, as if she is surprised.

As if she had believed it.

As if loving her sister has not been a war she’s been fighting all her life.

Zelda avoids her gaze and avoids for days.

Hilda never mentions men at all.

She doesn’t pick up the phone anymore.

She is not had against the floral hallway walls.

Zelda loses more money and looks haggard in the morning.

Hilda makes coffee and sends spiders spinning and wakes up to hexed familiars.

She says Zelda should talk to someone.

She says the same when she’s coming up from the earth.

“You _promised_.”

Zelda stares down from the porch and speaks more than she has in months.

“There are no promises that haven’t been broken. They are expired lies and I have no more use for them.”

“Satan’s sake Zelda—“

“Satan is false, and Lilith’s a witch. There are no sakes or saints or gods. There’s only a war we’re all losing.”

Hilda’s hand is muddy on her shoulder.

She shudders, jolts out of reach.

“Touch me again and I’ll kill you.”

“Kill me again and I’ll leave.”

They’re still making promises. Promises still get broken.

But Hilda stays true.

Hilda is gone before the grave has settled.

Zelda’s cry is feral.

~*~ Fireworks ~*~

Hilda works all the morning shifts.

Cee holds her sweet and tells her he missed her.

She holds his face very carefully between her hands and looks so much the same he could forget she was ever gone.

Her eyes have gone a little gray.

He doesn’t mention it.

She goes for jogs at the end of her shifts.

Shifts don’t end till after 11pm.

He doesn’t understand, but she doesn’t say so he doesn’t say.

Sometimes he wonders if she’s hurting.

She is so calm, so rhythmic, and he wonders why everything seems fractured.

One night, as she ties her running shoes, he breaks whatever silence they’ve somehow agreed upon.

Asks her quietly what’s going on.

Her answer is a firework, popping hot then quickly wicking out.

“I can’t go home.”

They go to his house, together.

She sits on his couch and smiles at all the right times, but she feels like a memory.

He watches her, worries for her.

She’s right there, and she looks like warm summer.

But her firework is gone, and her memory overplayed, and somewhere in her laugh he can hear a cry.

But she doesn’t say so he doesn’t say.

He wonders how someone can breathe and still drown.

~*~ Brand New City ~*~

The coven is going to shit.

Zelda is falling in pieces.

She is no longer held together by fate, by momentum, by Hilda.

She is rotting by loss and gravity.

She looks the same to the naked eye.

She is still so pretty. It’s the only way she knows how to live.

She no longer gambles.

She sleeps all the time.

She answers the phone when Sabrina calls.

She sends Ambrose the spell books he asks for.

She pretends not to know the exact number of days Hilda’s been gone.

Her name is among the many others that must never be mentioned.

She feeds the spiders and tells them Hilda won’t ever come back for them.

Anyone listening knows she’s not talking for their benefit.

A month passes.

Zelda’s gone so gaunt.

Most know better than to mention, but the younger witches and warlocks are less aware of ptsd and social convention.

“She looks like a bag of bones.”

She hears them once and laughs so sharp they could cut on the edge.

She goes silent for days.

She only breaks it to tell them the remaining academy teachers are in charge.

Artie Rookwell is over the moon. Ginny Locke is less than.

But they are all that’s left.

The coven asks their high priestess why.

She says she’s sorry, and they know she means it.

She says she needs to be away for a while.

Spend some time in a new city.

They wonder what that means.

They wonder where she’s going away.

They wonder if she’s really leaving to die.

~*~ Crack Baby ~*~

It’s a long time to be gone.

Zelda travels alone and smokes alone and self-destructs.

She takes in fumes and club noise and crawls every bar and pretends it fills the void.

When the beating of the drums begins to fade, she moves on.

She doesn’t know what she needs.

She needs it bad.

The cities welcome her lovely and cheer her drunken dance and never know her long enough to see the evident cracks.

She holds hands with the 2am winos and clutches the shoulders of woozy 3am women and goes home with none of them.

She has felt every form, felt nothing.

In every eager body reaching for her, she has seen a burning silhouette that a million masses could never fill.

She doesn’t know what she needs.

She needs it bad.

The countries change.

Zelda, always in transience.

She fills her lungs and her liver till she’s ready to burst at the seams.

The emptiness is unbearable.

Sabrina manages to get a hold of her in England.

They talk for hours.

Sabrina talks for hours.

When Zelda finally speaks, terrible truth spills out.

She says she’s a little lonely.

It is so quiet here.

What she doesn’t say speaks louder.

She doesn’t know what she needs.

She needs it bad.

Sabrina calls Ambrose.

He finds Zelda on the cliffs of Erris Head, staring out at the sunset.

She is so close to the edge.

“I held her hand here.”

It sounds so simple.

He knows it’s not.

“You should talk to her, Auntie.”

The head shake is so violently no.

“You should talk to someone.”

A halting moment.

She sits on a rock, a fragile nothing against the size of it.

He sits down too.

Their perspective looks suicidal, though they know it’s not.

This is a ledge they can rest on.

It will bear the weight.

“Talk to me. I’m here. Please.”

The breath rattles her frame.

“It’s been a difficult year.”

And then the tears are coming in rivulets, in streams, in waves.

He sits beside her and listens to the ocean.

Time passes till the moon beams down.

Zelda is shivering, but quiet.

Carefully, ever so neutrally, he puts an arm around her shoulder.

There’s a high arching stiffness, but then she leans against him.

“You are a good man.”

The words heal them both. If only a little.

“Let’s go home.”

It is enough for now.

~*~ Two Slow Dancers ~*~

It’s Sabrina who convinces her to visit Greendale’s school gymnasium.

Zelda had refused a welcome home party.

Sabrina compromises — a school function. A fall dance.

Zelda is tired of dancing.

Sabrina clutches one of Zelda’s hands.

Their blue nail polish looks the same.

The skin looks clean.

Zelda sighs, acquiesces.

Sabrina claps and hugs her so tightly, she fears her ribs will crack.

She would not mind very much.

Sabrina lets her go, lets her breathe, but doesn’t leave her side as she chooses something to wear.

Sabrina is giddy and chatting as casually as anything, but there’s a glint in her eye.

A fear.

A whisper in her head that if she looks away, even for a second, her aunt will be gone again in a flash.

Zelda aches and internally apologizes.

But as Sabrina runs hands through her closet, verbally raging against the patriarchy as her hands slide through fabric, that ache in Zelda’s chest eases ever so slightly.

Sabrina holds her hand as they go through the squeaking doors.

The wood smells old, as it always has.

There are tables and streamers and a disco ball spinning tacky on the ceiling.

Zelda thinks how Hilda would love it.

The sharpness is back.

Zelda drinks fruit punch and misses the alcohol.

The real Mary Wardwell looks on, proud of everyone’s forced sobriety.

Zelda watches her, tries to find any resemblance to the demoness who now reigns hell.

Ms. Wardwell only goes blank occasionally, a goldfish moment of nothing, but then she resorts back to normal.

Zelda wonders if they should all just move.

Leave Greendale forever.

“Zelds?”

She is frozen in space. 

Nearly forgets to breathe.

But isn’t it funny — she’s never forgotten that sound.

She’s remembered it every second of every day.

She turns.

Hilda is standing before her, and she’s still so much the same.

Her eyeshadow is still so blue.

Her cardigan is still yellow.

Her eyes still see Zelda in her entirety.

“You’ve grown out your hair.” Is all she can say.

“Yeah,” Hilda nods.

They are both disbelieving.

They are both missing each other.

“I like it.”

In all the hundreds and hundreds of times Zelda had imagined their reunion, she had not foreseen this disjointed awkward.

It would be easier if they were younger.

It would be easier if so many things hadn’t happened.

“It’s silly,” Zelda rushes, not wanting to say what she’s about to say but needing to say it anyway.

“What is?”

Hilda takes a step forward.

She does too.

“I thought we could stay the same.”

Hilda picks at her sleeve.

“We can’t.”

“I know.”

They stare on each other.

Eyes earnest, they watch the proud, hurt parts of themselves start to crumble.

She swallows thickly.

“I’ve missed you.”

Zelda means it like she’s never meant anything else.

“I’ve missed you too.”

The world swims as her eyes film. She swipes at them fiercely, cannot quell how her lips tremble.

Like a last gasp, last chance, she holds out her hand.

“How has it been?”

Hilda takes it in hers.

“It’s been so quiet here.”

They both squeeze gently.

The dance fades around them.

They are the last ones out.

**Author's Note:**

> i've made ANOTHER playlist:   
> https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjRAbOZEynLhURiNYqfgma3JZAygkw3oJ
> 
> thanks for sticking with the music nonsense and crying with me <3


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